2016-05-25

20CN reprieve?

After my last post, the good news is there appears to be a rebate for some of the 20CN bandwidth on 20CN only exchanges. This is BT's wonderfully simple pricing at work! We are reviewing what this works out at exactly, but it looks like it gets a lot closer to breaking even than we expected, for now.

This gives 20CN a bit of a reprieve, at least for a few months.

However, the underlying problem remains that the 20CN is a reducing number of lines and has its own separate back-haul billing. So the end game is the same. Even if you got to as low as £50/Mb/s/month then that last one 8Mb/s 20CN line would cost us over £400/month, and as we reduce to fewer and fewer active 20CN lines, the costs get closer and closer to that level.

So, at some point, probably this year, we have to come up with a solution for how we handle the last 20CN lines. Right now, we'll leave pricing unchanged.

16 comments:

It is a complicated discount they work out for bandwidth on 20CN only exchanges. I think our latest batch of moves from 20CN to 21CN has improved the discount so it is not now as bad as it was... Still trying to pin down details from the bills.

I need to write to my MP, Ian Blackford (it used to be [the late] Charles Kennedy) and see if we can't light a fire under BT. But I'm no longer on 20CN, now on 21CN - ADSL2 × 3 lines - so I can't speak as one of the afflicted.

If you're bored and foolish, http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/consultations/review-wba-markets/statement/WBA-Statement.pdf contains the price caps for 20CN in Market A areas - the key is that total costs are CPI - 10.7%, with sub caps on bandwidth of CPI - 7.7% and everything else of CPI - 4.7%. This applies only to 20CN in Market A areas - not 21CN, not 20CN outside Market A.

AIUI, BT have implemented this by charging what they like for 20CN (as they're permitted to do in Market B), but applying a rebate for Market A areas; given the price controls, A&A are likely to find it economic *extremely* soon to identify 20CN users in Market B areas, and force them to 21CN or TT.

The last statements I could find on the subject from BT were that they planned to shut 20CN down at the end of 2014 (prompting the level of squawking you'd expect from ISPs selling 20CN services!) - hopefully having all your remaining 20CN customers on 20CN-only exchanges will improve the economics for now, but have BT updated you (or the public) on 20CN plans for the next year or so?

The impression I had was that 20CN is supposed to be being phased out - hence the pressure to kill off 20CN services on exchanges that already have 21CN available - but no clear indication of a plan: are they ALL going to be upgraded to 21CN eventually? Does that mean next year? 2020? Or perhaps just reclassify the last remaining bits as 21CN and tie it in to the same backhaul, since presumably they'll reach a point it's not sensible to keep the little bit of legacy traffic segregated on that level.

We are not doing anything just yet on this - continuing to migrate to 21CN or TT as available, and oddly several smaller 20CN exchanges end up with FTTC as the alternative not 21CN ADSL. Eventually there will be a point we have to do something, but not just yet.

I had a reply from our MP, or rather one of his researchers, regarding the exchanges in our local area (I named seven local 20CN only exchanges). The reply he received from BT was apparently that they will be upgraded, but "at no point soon"

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